The furor over infamous whistleblower Edward Snowden continues, but yet the media misses the point entirely: Snowden isn’t the bad guy. The U.S. Government is the bad guy for illegally spying on its own citizens. Snowden merely pointed it out, but he’s not the guilty party.
While you can argue the ethics of what Snowden did, he makes an excellent diversion. As the media continues to concentrate on his whereabouts, the question lingers in my mind: Why is no one paying attention to the government’s illegal data gathering?
Another good question: Can they actually mine through what’s effectively zettabytes of crap, to “fight the terrorists”?
My immediate answer is, “No.” I mean, the Government lacked the competency to keep a lid on its own with Snowden, who thinks they have the smarts to actually find something in billions and billions of bytes of data?
That the government is spying on its own citizens is offensive enough. Every American should be outraged. Freedom is non-existent when an all-powerful government starts monitoring its citizens without due process. But, still, our big-corporation-controlled media is doing what the government wants, focusing the republic’s attention on Snowden.
No, the true offense here is how this thing came about. What was the true motivation behind storing all that information? You would think that the government would come out with examples and say, “We stopped this many attacks because of this program.”
Actually, the did say that. The number, I believe, was 50. But yet no arrests were made, which casts a shadow of doubt on the claim. Or perhaps arrests couldn’t be made because the data was gathered illegally, which brings me back to my first point: Why is the government collecting the data in the first place?
My guess: They were sold a program.
Specifically, this data collection program was sold to the government by corporations that manufacture large storage arrays.
I’m in the government business (part time), and let me tell you that government doesn’t just exist to provide for the general good. It also exists to help someone make a buck. I don’t like that, but many people accept it, nay demand it: Government is the teat upon which many businesses suckle. The milk is your tax dollars.
So my guess is that these companies that make the hardware that supports storing zettabytes of crap, they figured out a way to sell more storage. The only way to do that would be to manufacture a reason, a purpose, a need. What better way to require such a huge amount of storage then to make the government feel the necessity to collect every byte produced and transmitted over the Internet?
Bingo.
So the entire episode might not be an issue about national security and fighting the terrorists. And, sad to say, it really isn’t about violating your freedom. That’s merely an ugly side effect. The truth is, the whole data mining operation by the NSA was brought about by someone somewhere making a buck. The media needs to be looking for that guy, not Snowden.
